The Importance of Recycling Your Old Computer

Is your computer at the end of its life span and there is no other way to extend it? A replacement unit has been purchased to replace you old system, but one question remains – what do you do it the old computer? You might be asking yourself about different ways on how you could dispose your old computer safely. Consider recycling you computer, its safe for our environment.

The Importance of Computer Recycling

Today, two percent of the total waste in our landfills are from computers and other consumer electronics item. In general, recycling is important since our landfills are filling up. Recycling computers and monitors are especially important since they have a high amount of lead content and toxic metals which causes serious and irreversible damage to our surroundings, more particularly if these substances finds it way to our water supply.

Importantly, some of your personal information is stored in your computer. If you don’t know how to remove these from your system, you’re giving computer geniuses a chance to steal your identity once they stumble upon your old computer in the dumpster. This in turn leads to identity theft and a lot of problems.

Advantages of Computer Recycling

There are a lot of benefits that you will get once you recycle your computer responsibly. Number one on the list, you are ensuring that all your personal information will be erased from the machine making the hard drive useless to dumpster divers.

Secondly, you are doing your part in protecting our environment. By recycling your computer, you are keeping the harmful substances and toxins in your computer away from the water supply and out of the landfills. More importantly, the materials used to manufacture a computer is mined. By recycling your computer, these materials can be reused, which in turn spares our environment from further mining.

In other cases, a recycled computer can be used again. If there is a major part of the computer that is broken, other components that are still working will be used to repair other computers. This in turn provides an affordable computer which an individual or organization can use. Some recycling centers even donates rebuilt computers to charities. In this way, you have already helped the community just by the simple gesture of recycling your computer. That is why it is advisable that you look for a recycling center that works closely with a charitable institution/organization.

The Process in Recycling a Computer

Any responsible computer program will first erase all the information stored in the hard drive of the computer. This process ensures your privacy and protects all your personal and financial information. The next step of the recycling program would be evaluating the components of the computer, as to what could still be used to build new systems. All unusable parts are then broken down into their basic components, i.e. metal or plastic.

After being organized according to their type, the recycling center then sends these basic components to smelting factories, which in turn breaks them down into smaller pieces and melted in order to be made into other things. Precious metals which are found in the circuit board are extracted and reused. This way, these metals are conserved and keeps them out of our environment.

Research has shown that about 1.84 million tons of computers and other consumer electronics ends up in landfills and only about 18 percent are being recycled. Avoid increasing this sad statistic, start recycling your old computer.

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